Forget supply and demand... what about the contagious wild fire and lust for btc?

That was last year. Look at Google Trends for "bitcoin". Bitcoin is old news now. Notice that the Google Trends graph for Bitcoin strongly resembles the price graph.

Here's a useful Google Trends chart: "bitcoin" and "second life" Second Life was a hot concept in 2006-2007, a true 3D world anyone could visit on line and create their own content. Second Life is an excellent, impressive technology. It's still around, and it works fine. But it has 6% of the attention it had at peak.

Bitcoin's trajectory looks similar. Bitcoin's attention level peaked about a year ago, and it's now down to 25% of its peak search traffic. That's about where Second Life was a year after its peak.

Criticism is always welcome. But it would have been better if u do some constructive criticism. After so many scams, it is no wonder that people will wary about a new business in bitcoin, but at the same time it is also disheartening to see that you are calling something outright scam that we are working on for almost a year. I'd rather like to know, why do you think it is a scam and what would convince you that it is real ?

You lied about your business identity. You got caught. You don't get to handle the money of others.

Does anyone know of something that could explain this apart from pure panic?

In a thinly traded market in the middle of the night, stuff like this can happen. That's how we got from $205 to $152 in a few minutes. Now things have settled out around $180. But that's still down $25 from earlier in the day, and the $200 barrier has been broken for the first time.

One possibility is that traders, reasonably enough, have cut back on how much cash they keep on Bitstamp. This allows bigger swings at night, when few are trading, banks are closed, nobody can wire money in, and there's limited cash for buying. That may be how the price dropped to $152 so fast. Now it's back around $180 and reasonably steady.

Soon the UK will wake up, followed by the US. A lot of people in the Bitcoin world are going to be very unhappy tomorrow and will have to make some hard decisions. I don't think many will want to pour more cash into Bitcoin right now.

From an investor perspective, putting money into Bitcoin requires an exchange that isn't crooked or incompetent, and has significant volume. There are none left. Of the US dollar exchanges:

Bitstamp - two guys somewhere in Slovenia with a mailbox in London who are $15 million in the hole.

Mt. Gox - in liquidation.

Bitfinex - "The Bitfinex trading platform is currently in a beta phase (testing phase). The platform is owned and operated by iFinex Inc. (Bvi), and during this final phase the platform is being prepared to operate under a fully licensed model."

BTC-e - total buy side market depth right now, BTC225.

Everybody else in USD is too tiny to matter.

The China exchanges matter, but the volume there is widely assumed to be fake, and the prices may also be fake.

Bitstamp was the last exchange that appeared to be legit, and they blew it.

I'm always curious as to why people without bitcoin have 'no choice' but to buy bitcoins from the few that own them. There are plenty of businesses that may want to use bitcoin, but from a customer's point of view the only really compelling reason to own bitcoins is to buy something that's illegal or restricted in their own country. It's a valid use that cannot be denied, but it's a relatively small one.

Right. As I've pointed out before, Bitcoin has had two major bubbles - Silk Road and China exchange controls. Both existed only because Bitcoin offered what seemed to be a safe way to do something illegal or restricted. Both collapsed once the relevant authorities figured out how to stop it.

Opening a platform, accepting customer fiat and writing Bitcoin IOUs in theory requires very little starting cash (not factoring in MT licensing, regulatory anything, etc.). Once the fiat pool is large enough, you would have enough cash flow to cover the risk and could potentially invest it through your own exchange.

That's called "speculating with customer funds" and is a felony in many jurisdictions.

Running a Bitcoin exchange is cheap until something goes wrong. Then it's very expensive.

Hi everyone,I traded before in forex and I have some experience about trading (technical and fundamental) which technical is all about mathematic and can be used for any trend in the world and for BTC also. but what about fundamental?

In the Graham and Dodd sense, Bitcoin has no fundamentals. The Bitcoin world doesn't produce anything. There are no net profits. There's no underlying asset value. Bitcoin is zero-sum, a pure speculation.

The cost of producing a bitcoin will determine its price (the point of maximum pain), we will see more dumps and then it will stabilize, usage has already been accounted for and will not result in a spike until and unless there are new apps like silk road

No, no. Read some of the threads in mining speculation. This has been discussed many times. Price drives difficulty, not the other way round.

Now that's interesting. Their blog post indicates that the mining is outsourced: "Currently all cloud mining/maintenance costs are directed to the Hardware provider, hence, we are open for negotiations with additional mining hardware providers, who can offer favourable terms." Cex isn't a miner; they're a broker for mining capacity.

Apparently they had the option to stop paying their miners. Their contracts with miners must be highly favorable to CES. Now somebody else is stuck with a huge amount of unprofitable hardware. The miners may come crawling back with more favorable terms, trying to mitigate their losses. Or they may just shut down. We'll see the results in the hash rate.

More or less, yes. I still haven't seen a convincing use case for Bitcoin. The Silk Road and China bubbles only lasted until the relevant regulators could stop them. As a payment mechanism, Bitcoin is mediocre. Bitcoin for remittances didn't go anywhere. Bitcoin never became the petty cash of the Internet. And Bitcoin is an ever bigger crook magnet than I expected. There's still no Bitcoin exchange with proper auditing, and the failure rate of Bitcoin exchanges is well over 50% now.

I was expecting Bitcoin to become a currency used for little stuff like music tracks and in-game purchases. That would be useful, but it never happened.

As I've pointed out before, the Winkelvoss ETF is a dump. They bought a lot of Bitcoins, and now they want to cash out. If they sold them on an exchange, the price would crash. The ETF is an attempt to get rid of those Bitcoins without crashing the price.

Well, the price is back to where it was before Bitstamp went down - around $275-$280. Bitstamp being down only had a temporary effect.

The Paycoin debacle diverted some mining power from Bitcoin for a while, but that's over. (So is Paycoin, probably; it's dropped from $20 to $3, despite GAW's claim that they were going to support the market. Paycoin seems to have been just a pump and dump.)

The $300 support level for Bitcoin has been broken. It wasn't a dramatic event, just part of the long slide.